


Boys of Summer

by flashindie



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Slash, Stanley Uris Has OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 22:29:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13467906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashindie/pseuds/flashindie
Summary: So he bleeds again, a hundred little cuts, and Eddie fuckingfreaks.Stan tries to reconcile his feelings after the events of IT (2017), and Richie tries to be the best best friend he goddamn can.





	Boys of Summer

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, I haven't written fanfic in ages, and this piece got out of hand, but what can I say? 
> 
> I totally see Stan and Richie being adorable boyfriends in love, but not yet. This fic is canon, set a few weeks after the movie, so they're still tiny baby children.

So he bleeds again, a hundred little cuts, and Eddie fucking _freaks_. 

“You know it shouldn’t take this long, right? Animal bites typically take less than a week to heal, and this has been like,” he flusters, his hands flailing briefly in the air, broken arm and all. “It’s been three weeks, Stanley. And there’s not even scar tissue.” 

“It wasn’t an animal though,” Ben says, hovering attentively over Eddie’s shoulder. If Eddie thinks a thing of it, he doesn’t answer. Instead, he finishes dabbing the wound with an antiseptic wipe foraged from his fanny pack, before resting back on his heels in the dirt. He grabs Stan’s chin, forcing his head sideways, and inhaling a short, sharp breath. 

“This is fucked. It’s fucked, Stanley.” 

“Yeah, no shit,” Stan replies, jerking his face out of Eddie’s hand (not too hard, never too hard again). “But I’m fine. It’s just…some of them bleed sometimes still.” 

Because they do. That’s all, and he hates it. Today was supposed to be fun. Today was supposed to be milkshakes in town and sneaking into R-rated movies at the pictures. It was supposed to be loud noises around lots of people, and the summer heat at the backs of their necks, instead of at their feet, blistering up through grey water.

Stan blinks. 

“Why the fuck are you complaining, Kaspbrak? Chicks dig scars. Scarface, Inigo, Quint from _Jaws_. I’m not even kidding. In a few years, when they really set in, and they get like, that white, glossy look, this is going to be good for us.” 

“Shut _up_ , Richie.” 

“Yeah, Jesus.” 

It’s Bill who purses his lips, who looks down at Stan with the sort of worrying look that, before all of this, he’d only ever really reserved for Georgie. 

“If he says he’s f-fuh-fine, he is,” Bill says, but the look on his face isn’t exactly convincing. Stan can almost count the days on one hand that it’ll take the other boy to crack. To show up outside Stan’s place, _just to bike with him to meet up with the others_ , a gentle probe on the tip of his gentle tongue. Stan frowns, letting his eyes skim the faces of the other boys – Eddie and Ben’s obvious worry, and Mike’s careful gaze, and Richie too, who keeps up, like none of them had said a word. 

“Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a solid sixty percent scars, and the senior girls all keep posters of him up in their lockers. Scars are basically chick catnip, just ask your mom.” 

“Maybe they’re infected,” Eddie says. “Do you know how easy it is to get an infection from like, a seat on a public bus? Can you even _imagine_ how easy it is get one from -- from a fucking sewer clown?” 

“It wasn’t a clown. It was--” but the words won’t come. They stick to the roof of his mouth like taffy, and Stan has to tap his fingers, one at a time, on that point in his leg, just above his knee, where the bone feels closest to the skin. Once, twice, three times. Four for luck, then five and six for the pattern. Is there such thing as seven for luck? Before he can start it again though, Richie’s shoving him sideways, jerking him from his trance. Richie leans in, gets so close that Stan can smell sour candy on his breath and feel the cheap polyester of his Hawaiian shirt, trailing Stan’s bare knees. 

“I can’t see any green shit,” Richie says. He takes a handful of Stan’s curls and pulls his head sideways, wrinkling up his nose in examination. “Or pus or even clown jizz, so I think he’s probably fine.”

Eddie flusters, pinking at the shells of his ears. 

“Oh, is that your medical opinion, Doctor Trashmouth?” 

Richie stands, pushing his glasses up his nose. 

“What if it is?” 

“Well I’d ask to see your fucking credentials, Richie. What the fuck are you talking about? He has been _bleeding from the face_ for _weeks_.” 

And it’s statements like that that are easy to tune out, to refocus his attention on the neat lines of his summer shorts, and the low mint green press of his polo shirt. He flattens out each new crease, easing them between the ringer of his fingers, and growing more and more relieved that his silence slowly pulls the conversation away from his face. Eddie and Richie start bickering about Eddie’s mom and Richie’s big, fat mouth, and Ben starts talking about other mysterious wounds in the course of Derry’s mysterious history (anything to distract from Bev’s absence), something to which Mike and Bill turn their acute attention. 

Stan touches the wounds lightly, and when his fingers come away with only a few shallow pools of blood, he finds himself turning his finger tips to the open air, watching the blood river down his fingers and dry in the valleys between. His pulse quickens, and he stands up.

“I should probably go home anyway. Mom was going to call my bub-,” he clenches his eyes shut, bloodied fingers twitching at his sides. “I mean, my grandma, and she’ll flip if I’m not there to talk to her too.” 

He grabs his backpack off the ground, throwing it over his shoulder and pauses only long enough to catch the quiet and the worry on each of the boys’ faces before he turns tail and runs. Well. Not-runs. Walks quickly, responsibly, trying to wrangle the sharp intake of his lowly breath. He’s already back on the road, a leg over his bike, the park edging into his rear view vision, when he catches the shadow in the corner of his eye, something long and unkempt. 

Stan picks up his pace. 

“Stanley,” the voice groans, and Stan stops, sitting back into his heels, and letting the shadow – or rather, the person, ride into view.

“What are you doing, Richie?” 

Because he knows it’s him, knows it from the wobbly path of the bike, even though Richie’s one of the best riders Stan knows, knows it for the silhouette of his shadow and the vague smell of dollar-store soap and sweat and salt that seems to follow the other boy wherever he goes. 

“I’m riding you home.” 

The voice sounds loud, clear and certain, and Stan blinks, dropping a foot to the road. Richie hasn’t ridden him home since they were in first grade, since before Bill and Eddie, since the loser’s club was just the two of them, the last picked kids in class. His stomach clenches uncomfortably. 

“Why?” 

Richie cycles a full circle around him, and then another, before adopting a paternal, British voice. 

“Because last time we let you wander off on your own, Stanny, my boy, you got yourself into a spot of trouble.” 

“I didn’t wander off,” Stan hisses, but then, he’s not sure what he did. Their time in the sewers is both in eternal sharp focus, and oddly hazy, like looking at something very familiar through frosted glass. His fingers twitch at the handlebars of his bike, and he almost moves them back to that spot at his knee, only to find the other boy slowing to a stop directly in front of him.

“Well, what did you do, Uris?” 

And Stan knows the tone. Has known Richie more years than he hasn’t, and the only time Richie reverts to surnames is for puns or a fight, and this is not a pun. But then - - Stan blinks again, hard, head jerking back. 

“Wait, are you mad at me?” Stan asks, baffled, and Richie shrugs, picking up the pace on his bike again. 

“Who could be mad at those cherub curls? You look like a little Jewwy angel.”

_That’s not an answer_ , Stan thinks, but waits until Richie’s orbit is behind him to start his own route again towards home. He half-expects Richie to drop off (Richie’s attention only ever feels truly felt in the moment) but the other boy is close behind, beating his long legs faster against the pedals than Stan ever remembers that he can. 

“Don’t get bitchy just because you got your face period.”

Stan pinks, bright, and drops hard on the brakes again, only when he turns around to get mad, it’s only to see Richie’s back, pedalling off into the distance, back towards the others.

&

After the sewers, after IT, after the painted woman, and the floating kids, and Bill, shooting his little brother point-blank in the head. After the long climb out, his parents take him to the hospital.

It’s hard to tell them what it is exactly, and so he doesn’t tell them anything, even as his father grows sterner in his fury, and his mother tries to coax answers, a gentle, prying tone to her soft voice. They don’t get it, and there’s not a thing that Stan can tell them that won’t get him a one-way ticket back to therapy (and man, it’d taken a lot of performance to get them to let him out of that in the first place – a lot of careful wording, a lot of will, to suppress his compulsions in front of them, or at least, the ability to move quick enough so as to not do things in front of them). 

Instead, they’d sat there for almost seven hours in Emergency, as a nurse with steady hands had treated each little bite mark with ethanol, and another had appeared to stab him with a rabies booster. _You’re a bit of a bleeder, huh?_ The nurse had said, and Stan had just shrugged, his thoughts elsewhere. He’d wondered then, however briefly, however sleepily, if any of the other Losers had had to go to the hospital too, and he’d faked going to the bathroom three times to wander through the waiting room and peer beneath curtains at other patients, but none of them had been there. 

It had just been him after all.

&

True to Stan’s suspicion, Bill arrives on his doorstep the next afternoon, his bike neatly propped against the gate, and his hair brushed. Stan’s mom flounders, offering hand-pressed lemonade and the chocolate rugelach she’d been practicing for Stan’s cousin’s bat mitzvah. Bill takes one of each, compliments her on both, and Stan rolls his eyes at his mother’s proud blush. She’s always liked Bill best.

“Are you and Richie my new chaperones?” he asks as soon as his mother is out of earshot. He picks a loose thread off his shorts, rolling it into a neat little ball between his thumb and forefinger, letting it thread in the grooves of his skin, his gaze neatly fixed on the motion. 

“Only if you want us to be,” Bill says. “We’re w-worried about you. You haven’t been your-s-se-se.” He blinks, takes a breath. “Yourself.” 

Stan scuffs a shoe into the carpet, resisting the urge to raise a hand to pick at the newly forming scabs on his face. He sees the exact second Bill clocks the movements, his lips twitching down. 

“Shouldn’t I be the one worried about you?” Stan asks lightly. “The sewer, it was…” 

He shrugs, hoping that that’s enough of an answer. Stan’s not good with words, at least not these ones. They jumble in his mouth, in his head. Wriggle around in there and burrow deep, until he feels like he needs a trowel or a shovel to bring them back to the surface. 

“I’m okay,” Bill says with a shrug. “I miss Beverly.” 

_I miss Georgie_ isn’t said, but Stan hears it all the same. He rocks back onto his heels, lets them grind back into the carpet. He taps his fingers, once, twice, three times. He nods sharply, glancing back to catch Bill’s worried gaze, and there’s so much he wants to say. He wants to say that he knows, that he gets it, that, in spite of it all, he misses Beverly too, and Georgie. That he misses who they all were before IT, even if he doesn’t regret meeting Ben or Mike or Bev. That he doesn’t really know who he is now – who any of them are. He doesn’t know if he ever will again. 

“We’ll be late if we don’t hurry,” Stan says instead. “We shouldn’t keep the others waiting.” 

And they won’t, even if they have to wait for his mother to bundle up the rest of the rugelach for the others.

&

The second time the wounds from the painted woman bleed is only a day after she’d made them.

He’s at home, in bed, his face bandaged up, and he has a bad dream, that’s all. A nightmare about glowing eyes and too many rows of teeth and the curl of filthy water at his ankles, and he wakes up and there’s blood on his pillow and blood in his hair, and he twitches as he strips his sheets and he washes them all in the bathroom sink, his fingers working raw, and then afterwards he gets every shirt from his closet and he washes them too, and then all his socks and his pants and his underwear, and that’s how his mother finds him, hours later, black eyed from lack of sleep, a bathroom full of wet clothes spread around him and his face and neck sticky with blood.

&

But that’s then.

Right now, Stan and Bill pull back up in the park, leaving their bikes against the back gate as they hurry up the twisting path, the container of rugelach tight in Stan’s hands. 

The park is busy, this late in the summer. The throes of people – of smaller kids playing with plastic lightsabers and wailing at the tops of their lungs, and the older kids huddling down by the monument, hiding cigarettes in the shadows even as the smoke sticks to their clothes - seemingly all around them. Bill walks ahead, fearless and firm, and Stan scurries behind, half a step back, always, fighting the urge to count his steps. 

The others are already there, Ben and Eddie spread out across the grass, notebooks open between them and the radio blaring, and Mike and Richie are off in the distance, cutting through the wild grass at the edge of the path, laughing at something Stan can’t hear. He wants to hear. Stan usually wants to hear. He finds his gaze fixing over Bill’s shoulder, out towards the other boys, but they’re lost to him now, and he’s left rocking back into his heels and turning instead towards Ben and Eddie and dropping the container of rugelach down between them. 

“ _No_ ,” Eddie insists to Ben, and then, vaguely, a twitch of Bambi-big eyes. “Hey, Stan. Ben, it’s not about sacrifice, it’s about the burden of knowing. Roland let Jake fall, and they both have to live with that because of the time paradox.” 

Ben just blinks owlishly back, his pale face flushing pink with the attention or the argument, Stan doesn’t really know. He just fixes his gaze beyond them, to the long, brushing trees that frame this part of the park, and then down, towards Richie and Mike and Bill, still laughing. Bill tilts an imaginary hat, adjusts an imaginary whip – Indiana Jones in the make-believe, and Mike and Richie grin, falling back into position. Or, at least – Mike does. Richie adopts his own hat, yells something about a mirror-verse Indiana Jones, and starts dramatically mimicking Bill’s every move. 

“Stan - - _Stan_.”

Stan blinks, only to be met with Eddie’s hand, clicking in front of his face.

“Jesus, Stanley.”

“What?” he asks, defensively, and Eddie just rolls his eyes, folding his small body back onto the picnic blanket. 

“I just asked what you brought,” Ben says, casting a skittish gaze between the two. It’s enough to make Stan blush, to pop the lid of the Tupperware, and let Eddie and Ben descend on the contents. 

“It’s rugelach. My mom made it.”

“It’s a Jewwy pastry,” Richie adds, dropping onto the blanket beside him and pulling three from the container. He sets them out along his bare legs, so the filling leaves dark smears at his skin. “Like a doughnut with a chocolate yarmulke .” 

The others have all descended – Mike and Bill too, and they eat in a messy fashion, until the chocolate and the cream cheese and the butter melts at their fingertips and marks up their chins. It’s enough to make Stan grimace, to rock back in his seat, to find that spot just above his knee and tap it again, once, twice, three times. Four for luck. He loses count after that, just sets up the pattern, and watches his friends argue over _Dark Tower_ characters and who really deserves the hero death in the latest _X-Men_ comics. 

He’s pulled from his reverie by a bird call – one loud enough to still his hand. It’s something unusual, a distinct bleat, and he stands up suddenly, ignoring Richie’s vague joke behind him about weird bird noises calling people home, and dashes up the grassy slope towards the creek. 

It’s there that he sees it. It’s pinkish chest, it’s paper-white head (with a hiccup, he thinks it’s almost like clown make-up, but he buries the thought before it can get much further). The duck swims along the shallow creek, dipping it’s beak to collect small fish and waving its midnight-black tail. Stan sits on the grass, wishes he had his notebook, his father’s camera, his binoculars, anything to see it better. 

“Congratulations on the duck,” Richie says, dropping to the grass beside him. He’s wearing an uglier shirt than yesterday, if that was even possible. Something with a bold, vine print and cartoon mice. His khaki shorts are stained, and he’s not wearing socks with his sneakers. He sloppily pushes up his glasses. “You can add it to your collection. I mean, I figured geese were the rare ones in the game.” 

“Not your best joke,” Stan says, watching the bird raise its head, shake it off. There’s an insect in its beak – a salamander he thinks, or a walking fish. 

“They can’t all be winners,” Richie agrees, watching Stan watch the bird. 

“It’s not a duck, you know? I mean, it is, technically, I guess. But really it’s an eider. A Steller eider. They’re native to Scandinavia, but they occasionally show up here. It’s rare though, that they do.” 

Richie seems to consider this, however briefly, and Stan is oddly grateful for the quiet, or, more than that, for _Richie’s_ quiet. They so often have to talk. He should’ve known it wouldn’t last long. 

“Your OCD is bad again,” Richie says frankly. “Like, you’re always twitchy, but you’re like you were before. Like when we were little.” 

And Stan remembers the ‘before’ that Richie means. The times when his OCD wasn’t just neat lines and a few unshakable habits. When it was being paralysed over vegetables touching on his plate or unstoppable tears over wrongly sorted crayon boxes. When it would take them four times longer than it should have to get anywhere, because Stan had to take exactly one hundred and eleven steps (or a hundred and eleven more) to get wherever they wanted to go. 

(Richie had made fun of him then, but he’d never actually seemed to care. He’d walked all one hundred and eleven steps too, not one less, not one more, even if it was to walk somewhere they could’ve gotten in twenty.) 

“I’m fine,” Stan says, fisting the grass below him, watching the eider on the creek top. “They’re just changing my medication.” 

The response is instant. Richie drops his hand to an imaginary dial, twisting it lightly, his forehead creasing. He pulls out an imaginary bit of fax paper. “Wow, Bob, this one is registering pretty high on the bullshit meter.” 

Richie pushes up his glasses. 

“You think I wouldn’t know if you changed medication? At least Eddie’s are impossible to keep track of. You take one pill, Stanley, and it’s the same one you’ve taken since third grade.”

Stan wrinkles his nose.

“You know that, but you can’t remember to do your homework so you don’t have to copy mine.” 

“Um, yes, because I understand the meaning of prioritisation and delegation, unlike _> you._” 

“So you delegate me your homework?” 

Richie nods, brazen. 

“And I keep track of you. I’m basically your manager.”

And isn’t that a horrifying thought? Stan blanches, and it’s enough to make Richie grin, despite himself. 

“Whatever, Stanley,” Richie says with a sniff, standing up. “Keep your secrets, see if I care.” 

It takes him maybe two seconds to correct himself, holding out a hand to Stan. 

“I mean, I do care. Just for the record. A lot. And you should tell me, because you know how much I love failing to keep secrets.” 

“I know,” Stan says, rolling his eyes, and he doesn’t say much else, but he lets Richie pull him up and take him back to the others all the same.

&

They end up staying at the park until the sun starts to bleed orange over the top of them, bold and vital, leaving everything bright before it gives way to the darkness. Richie had disappeared almost as soon as he’d brought Stan back to the group, charging after Eddie and tackling him to the ground. Eddie’s scream had brought stares along with it, as had the yelling fight they’d had afterwards about snapping necks and Eddie’s still-broken arm.

Stan rolls his eyes, folding down onto the picnic blanket beside Mike as Bill heads over to diffuse Eddie and Richie’s fight. He’s so distracted watching them, he doesn’t even realise he’s touching his face until Mike grabs his wrist. 

“Stan, you’re - -” Mike pauses, and Stan blinks up at him. He pulls his hand away, and is somehow still surprised to see the blood again, coating his thin fingers. He drops his hand quickly, but Mike doesn’t quite let go of his wrist yet. 

“Can I?” he asks then, and Stan blinks, sees the still-fading bruises below Mike’s eyes from Henry Bowers’ fists, and the uncertainty written on his face. Stan nods, and Mike pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket, pressing it to the side of Stan’s face. 

“You’ve got to tell me if this is weird,” Mike says suddenly. “Homeschool doesn’t exactly prepare you for friends.” 

Stan grins, despite himself. “Neither does regular school really.” 

It’s enough to make Mike smile, pleased, as he wipes away another lick of blood from the other side of Stan’s face with the rough flat of his thumb. He wipes it into the handkerchief. Stan itches to raise his fingers to it again, to prod the wound, but he can feel Richie and Bill’s eyes on him, even as they still argue across the park. 

“You know, I still don’t know how you guys met,” Mike says. “I mean, I know how you met Ben, of course, and me, and Bev too, but not the four of you.” 

Above them, the day seems to yawn, to stretch itself out, and Stan likes it best of all, this shrug before the afternoon, the lazy heat of it, the gentle sounds of sparrows and field pigeons, of cicadas, buzzing in the breeze. 

“It’s not much of a story, to be honest. I met Richie in preschool. We were the only kids left, I guess, when everyone else paired up, and then when we went to school, Bill and Eddie were outcasts too. The last kids picked for anything. I guess we were weird. _Are_ weird. And it’s hard to be weird on your own, but it’s not as hard to be weird together.” 

Mike seems to turn this over in his head, and Stan’s gaze goes out again to where Richie is practicing jump kicks in front of Bill and Eddie and Ben. He leaps too high at one stage, tumbles to the ground, and Stan finds his heart lurching until Richie bounds back up, holding up his hands in the air, eyes closed, as if for applause. As if he landed it perfectly, and didn’t end up ass-first in the dirt. Stan rests back down (when had he started to get up?) and scoffs. 

When he turns around again, it’s to Mike, looking at him thoughtfully. 

“I think there might be more to the story than that,” Mike says.

&

It’s days before his parents let him out of their sight, but not so long that he feels smothered exactly. His parents aren’t like Richie’s, or even Bill’s, who ignore them for a bottle and their grief respectively, but they are quickly distracted by their own lives and the synagogue, and watching Stan like a hawk is soon forgotten. It’s on the third day that he’s able to ride out to meet the others, bandages and all, and they slice their hands open and press them together in the sort of universal blood pact which promises a reunion and a fight that Stan’s not quite sure he can stomach.

Still, when Mike asks him that day about the story of their friendship, he doesn’t think exactly of preschool and gym class and Henry Bowers sharkish grin, but rather that moment of the blood pact, when he’d looked around at them and wondered at the power of a unifying trauma, and if it weren’t for IT, or for Bowers, or the monsters in their lives, if they’d ever really have been friends at all.

&

“I don’t really need anything,” Stan tells his mother, but she frowns, pointedly, pulling out a yellow polo shirt with a small, embroidered duck at the chest.

“Stanley, sweetie, you at least need a few new shirts. The new school year is all about starting fresh, isn’t it? So let’s start you looking it.” 

He meets her frown with one of his own, but his mother only folds the shirt across her arm anyway, a sign as good as a sale, and Stan sighs, debating telling her that that shirt is as far away from a fresh start as he’s likely to get at school, as it’s a pretty sure sign that he’ll get beat up. His mother heads towards the next rack over, and Stan rolls his eyes, wandering out the aisles and towards the entry way of the mall. It’s not exactly a big one – Derry doesn’t exactly have the volume of people to demand one, but there’s a few stores – a Radio Shack, a maternity store, a barber, a pet store, and it’s the latter that he finds his way towards. 

In the window are three puppies, all of them mutts from the local pound. They scramble in plain view, barking distorted by the thickness of the glass. Stan raps his fingers there for a second, two, watching as the puppies take note and bolt towards him, smearing their wet noses on the glass. He grins, tries again, and one licks it, leaving a trace of slobber, but then the other puppy pounces on him, and they rough house a minute, two, before one of the puppy’s opens its maw and bites the other one’s face hard, and then Stan isn’t at the pet store at all. 

Then he’s back in the sewers, the painted lady pressing him into the murky water, and suddenly he can barely breathe, his fingers working overtime at that spot on his knee, and he – he –

“If it isn’t Stan Urinal.” 

Stan blinks, turning around, sweating. He can feel the scars on his face prickling with blood, can see it, the exact moment this kid, older, Stan only vaguely recognises him from school, some wannabe Bowers, does too. His face splits into a grin, as he cracks his knuckles. 

Stan drops back into his heel, and then rises again, drops back again, rises again, but his foot doesn’t seem to want to leave the ground – is cemented there like yesterday’s news, and he rocks, up and down again, his eyes slipping shut, the jostle of the mall around him like a dream. Like he lies here, alone, in the cavity of a beast, waiting to claw his way out. 

In hindsight, he probably should’ve seen the punch coming.

&

If you asked Stan about the first time he got hit, he’d say it was by Richie Tozier.

This was back when they were little, before Eddie and Bill, back when the kids on the playground mostly pretended they didn’t exist, but there’d been this one kid, some asshole, who’d gained what looked like a hundred pounds between the Caterpillar Room and the Butterfly Room, and Stan and Richie, even then, had known exactly what that meant. 

“So I’ll hit you,” Richie had said. “So that you know what to expect, and then when we’re older and we remember the first time we got hit, it’ll just be you and me, and not that guy. It’ll just be us. For always.” 

At the time, it had made no sense, and complete sense, in a way that Stan would forever come to associate with Richie Tozier, so in the playground, after class, they’d landed a punch each, and then gotten snow cones from the gas station, their bruised knuckled hands tight within the others.

&

This time though, it wasn’t Richie doing the punching, but it was Richie who found him in the mall carpark, his shoes thick with dirt, as Stan tried to think up a lie to tell his mom when she finally found him.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Stan shrugs, pressing his fingers to the tender bruise already blossoming on his face. He can feel it swelling, pushing out, making his stupid scars trickle blood. Richie dumps his bike on the ground behind them and walks over. He pulls Stan’s head back by his curls and takes a good look. He frowns. 

“Bowers is dead,” Richie says. “Like, ding dong witch dead.” 

“Believe it or not, I am still the only Jew at Derry Middle School,” Stan sniffs, trying to pull his head free. Richie’s fingers just tighten though, pulling lightly, before he sighs and releases him. He bends down in front of him instead, takes in Stan’s bloody knee from where it had hit the ground at the punch, the black eye, the scraped up hands. “Not even Bowers’ death can cure me of that.” 

Richie tugs his backpack off his shoulder and pulls out a water bottle. He splashes some water onto Stan’s knee, onto his hands, to wipe out any dirt. 

“You know the other day,” Richie says suddenly, still pouring water. “When you asked if I was mad at you?” 

“Yeah.”

“Well, I think I am.”

Stan blinks, jerking his leg away from Richie’s efforts. He glowers at the other boy, and is surprised to see Richie meeting his glower right back. 

“Well, maybe I’m mad at _you_ , Richie.”

Richie balks, like Stan knew he would, but he doesn’t go either, like Stan knew he wouldn’t. Richie just gets more aggressive in his treatment, dabbing harshly at the wound on Stan’s leg. 

“Sorry if I don’t take it personal anymore. You’re always mad at me for something or other.”

“Oh, but I should take it personal that you’re mad at me?”

Richie looks up at him then, his big lips set in a neat little frown.

“Yeah, Stanley, you fucking should. I’m like, the most chill guy in all of fucking Derry, and I’m mad at you.” 

“Well, what for?” his voice cracks, and it’s enough to make him cringe, to leave him tilted back in his seat and yearning for the end of this conversation. He can see Richie clock him, see him hear what Stan says and what he doesn’t, and, after a minute, surge back. 

“Are you kidding? Stanley, you are a walking nightmare. You won’t talk to any of us about _anything_ , and you’re obviously upset, and I get that, okay? I do, we’re all upset, but at least the rest of us are trying to move on. You just sit there and scratch at your face, and won’t play any games with us, and you won’t _talk to me_.” 

“Won’t talk to you?” Stan scoffs. “What would I talk to you about, Richie? Sure, maybe you can forget, and move on, but every time I see myself, I remember what happened. I see my scars, because they _still bleed_ , and sure, you might think scars are the mark of a hero, but do you know who else has scars, Richie? Freddy Krueger, and Jason, and…and…the monster from that _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ movie that you made me watch, and _bad guys_ , Richie. Bad guys have scars. And maybe I’m a bad guy. Maybe this is my villain origin story, not my hero one, and you can play at being Indiana Jones all you like, but I _can’t_.”

He’s shaking when he stands up, arms twitching, legs wobbling, as he turns and walks back into the mall to find his mother, Richie sitting stunned behind him.

&

That night he cries at dinner because there are too many colours on his plate. He can’t help it, they sit there, those orange carrots, those white mashed potatoes, the uneasy slope of ketchup. He’s shaking so hard by the end of it, that his mom takes him upstairs and has to talk him down. He doesn’t leave the house for two days. Instead he cleans every inch of his bedroom, scrubs until his fingers bleed instead of his face for a change, and when his parents start talking about therapy again, he lies beneath his bed and pounds his fists into the bottom of his bedframe so hard that his hands go black.

&

“What happened to your face?” Eddie asks, eyes wide, and Stan shrugs. The bruise has already started to yellow at the edges, his knee has almost healed, but he knows they both still looks bad. When he doesn’t answer, Eddie rolls his eyes, sharing a knowing look and a silent conversation with Bill around Stan’s head.

“Maybe it was a burst blood vessel,” Richie says, cutting at the grass beside the quarry with a stick. “You know how much Staniel likes to keep his top button clipped. Maybe all the useless bird facts and Jewwy habits finally pressurised in his head and exploded inside him.”

Stan frowns over him, but Richie just smiles sweetly back. 

“Or maybe it’s my brain trying to escape having to have another stupid conversation with you.” 

That, at least, is enough to make a dark look cross Richie’s face, even if it’s replaced quickly by the same saccharine smile. Richie cuts at the grass a little harder. 

“Or maybe you could suck my dick, bird boy,” he says, before throwing himself bodily at Ben, a clear sign that the conversation, at least for now, is over.

&

In movies, villains laugh, and they say _any last words_ , and a good hero will say the perfect ones. It’ll be a smart quip or an earnest plea or declarations of perfect love. It’ll be words you could hang a universe on, but IT hadn’t asked, not as Pennywise, or as the painted woman. Last words are things monsters say you get in stories, but this is not a story, and Stan’s last word would’ve been the name of a girl he barely knew, burning a hole through his tongue.

&

“Beverly rang me last night,” Ben says later, his cheeks pink, his body folded forwards. “Portland is good. She says her aunt lets her watch whatever she wants until nine o’clock, and that her cousin makes her own dog biscuits, even though she doesn’t have a dog anymore. I mean, that’s kind of weird, I guess, but Beverly doesn’t seem to mind.”

Stan hums a vague noise he hopes is conciliatory. The day seems to peel open around them in the park. To project bright and bold down on them, and Stan finds himself wanting to laze back on the short, prickly grass and sleep. But then, sleep isn’t always good. Sleep so often has nightmares for him, lying in wait. 

“I guess family can be weird though, huh? I mean, think of Eddie’s mom, or Bill’s parents, or anyone’s. My dad used to say you’re best off just making your own family, but I don’t know how that works.” 

Across the grass, Richie, Bill and Mike are running at each other in faux football tackles, a game of athletic chicken, faking out at the last possible second. Eddie throws his arms up, frustrated from his spectator spot, yells something Stan can’t hear. Richie falls down dramatically, throwing his own arms in the air in an almost perfect impression. Stan can’t quite stop his grin. 

“I guess you and Richie would know though, huh?” Ben says, and then his voice shifts, adopting a dreamy tone. “You guys are almost romantic.” 

Stan frowns. 

“What is?” 

“You and Richie.”

“Romantic?” Stan asks, disbelieving, his chin dropping with his tone, and Ben blushes, laughs, plays with his hair. 

“Maybe that was the wrong word? Maybe? I don’t know. You guys are just something else together, you know? There’s like…” 

Ben flusters, his blush deepening. He rings his hands in the hem of his t-shirt, and Stan rolls his eyes, pulling his legs up to his chest, hugging them in tight. 

“We’re fighting,” Stan says, and Ben startles.

“Really?” 

Stan nods sharply, his gaze finding Richie’s across the green. Richie clocks him, turns around in a dramatic friendly wave, before promptly giving him the finger. Stan glowers in reply. 

“What are you fighting about?” 

And Stan means to give a bullshit half answer, he does, but then – Ben is not his parents, who don’t know anything, or Bill, who knows too much. Ben is just Ben, still new, and too earnest, but also kind, and smart, and the sort of boy Stan won’t ever stop wanting to know better. So, accidentally, Stan tells him almost the whole damn thing. 

When he’s finished talking about Richie following him home, and their fight there, and then at the mall, and then at the quarry, and the fact that Richie just won’t _let this alone_ and that Stan really doesn’t need him, and anyway, Richie has basically not talked to him forever anyway, Ben finally interrupts. 

“So,” Ben says, voice slow, his face rippled in confusion. “You’re fighting about how much you love each other?” 

“What? _No_ , we’re fighting about - -” Stan pauses, and Ben looks at him, judgeless and patient. Stan flusters, pinks, his fingers reaching for the scabs on his face. Ben grabs his wrist. 

“You’re going to make them bleed again,” Ben says, and Stan looks away, backwards, at where Richie’s still watching him across the grass, an unknowable look on his face, and Stan damn near _growls_ as he stands up, toes kicking up the grass, letting bugs leap around his every step as he heads home without so much as a goodbye.

&

Later that night, in bed, but still wide awake, Stan thinks Ben really doesn’t know a thing.

Sure, he’s a pretty perceptive kid, but he hasn’t even known them that long. Heck, hasn’t even lived in _Derry_ that long, and the only reason his attention is on them is because Bev’s gone to Portland and IT is, well, wherever IT is these days (hopefully dead, please, G-d, dead). He’s probably just trying to distract himself, Stan thinks, wriggling further down into bed, tugging the sheets up. 

That’s it. Ben’s upset, and probably traumatised, and Richie and Stan are a safe drama, or whatever. Something present and fixable and not even really a drama at all, if Stan really thinks about it, because they’ll be okay once Richie apologises, and things go back to the way they always were. 

Stan’s jerked from his thoughts by the sound of his bedroom window opening. 

He fumbles blearily in the dark, switching on his bedside lamp, and is only half surprised to see Richie’s long body drag in through the frame. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks sharply, and Richie drops to the floor, bouncing up and dramatically brushing off the dust from his shirt. 

“Thought I’d stop by, see how you were, check for monsters under the bed, that sort of thing.” 

He crouches down, a hand to his forehead, peering scrupulously under Stan’s bed. 

“You know,” Richie says thoughtfully as he looks. “There is such a thing as being _too_ clean.” 

Stan has to force himself to stay lying down, clenching his eyes shut and taking a few steadying breaths. If he can will himself back to sleep, Richie might go. He might leave Stan alone, and Stan can just pretend this was another dream, might even be glad to pretend it is one. It’d be nice to have dreams that didn’t have painted women or clowns, or his friends, bleeding out in grey water, in them anymore. Richie’s voice cuts straight through it. 

“Are you seriously ignoring me?” 

Stan opens his eyes, fingers fisting the sheets. 

“We’re fighting, Richie. We’re in a fight.”

“We wouldn’t be if you knew how to apologise.” 

It’s enough to make him sit bolt upright in the bed, turn towards Richie, mouth open, cheeks flushed, and there’s so much there, on the tip of his tongue. About how Stan _does_ know how to apologise when he’s done something _wrong_ , or about how it’s not his fault that Richie doesn’t know boundaries, or that of all the things Richie’s let Stan get away with over the years, this couldn’t be one of them. Because really, Stan knows, he does. Even Bill and Eddie would get annoyed at Stan’s counting, at his pull, at his quiet, desperate needs, but not Richie – Richie… Richie has bright, brown eyes, but they are not bright tonight. There’s a finger-grip bruise on Richie’s arm though, and a shadow across his face that leaves Stan’s belly twisting. He sighs. He pushes his sheets back. Richie grins, a real one this time, and Stan opens his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah,” Richie says, kicking off his shoes and climbing into bed beside him. “No spooning, no socks, no touching your hair or your face, and if I talk, I get the floor.” 

Stan promptly closes his mouth. 

“Right.” 

Richie laughs, but he doesn’t talk, and Stan wakes up in the first bleed of morning to Richie hugging his back, one arm tight around Stan’s narrow waist, the other hand crushed beneath Stan’s face, half in Stan’s curls, and Richie’s dirty-socked feet locked up between his own legs. At least he didn’t talk, Stan thinks, leaning back into Richie’s easy touch and the warm shell of his body. At least, he thinks, yawning, any further thought falling sideways to sleep.

&

Richie’s gone the next time he wakes up, but there’s a note on Stan’s bedside table that says _You’re dumb and we’re fighting again_ and then, written really tiny at the bottom of the paper, is _thanks_ and then another word, but it’s been scratched out and Stan can’t read it. He means to throw it away, he does, but he puts it in the top drawer of his desk instead.

&

By the time Stan gets to the park, Richie’s already there, talking in hushed voices to Bill at the end of the path. A part of him debates going over, but instead he opts to fold down beside Eddie on the grass.

There’s something heavy about the air today, clammy to the touch, and he wonders if it means they’re due for a summer storm. He hopes so, hopes it for a lot of reasons, none so much as it might mean a few days inside instead of here or at the swollen water of the quarry. 

“Mom wants to take me to the doctor before school starts,” Eddie says, hand shaking at his knee. “She said it’ll just be to get them to check my arm, but I don’t want to go. The doctor said last time I wouldn’t need another appointment for a month.” 

Stan pauses, considering this. “She’s been better though, hasn’t she? Maybe she’s just worried.” 

Eddie groans at the words, but nods all the same, a scowl marring his face. He looks out at where Mike has joined Bill and Richie, at where he laughs at something Richie says. The light hits Mike just right, making him glow. His bruise from Bowers is almost totally gone now, and it leaves him looking like he did before. Good and strong. Like a comic book hero. Richie beside him, gangly and awkward and oddly, _bizarrely_ cute, like a sidekick. Like the comic relief to this fucked up story. Like something better than it. It’s enough to make Stan look away, back down at his scratched up knees, at his grazed hand, and even without his reflection, he can see the scabs, see his own blackened eye. He closes his eyes.

“Do you ever wonder why we’re friends?” 

“What?” 

When Stan opens his eyes again, Eddie’s sitting closer, confusion marking up his face. Stan blushes, clears his throat, his nervous fingers finding that spot just above his knee again, tapping once, twice, three times. 

Four for luck. 

“I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately. About us, down in the sewers. About IT. About…all of it.” 

Eddie goes quiet then, and Stan’s not sure what he’s expecting, but it’s not what Eddie says. 

“You need to stop.” 

“What?” 

“Yeah, okay, it was messed up. All of it has been so _messed up_ , and maybe _we’re_ all messed up now, but thinking this sort of crap isn’t helping anything, and it’s just upsetting Richie. We’re friends, Stan. It doesn’t matter why. All I know is I couldn’t have done what we did down there with anybody else, and _that_ is what matters.” 

“But-”

Eddie groans, throwing his arms up in the air. 

“Seriously, Stanley. There’s no point in this. In talking about _this crap_ anymore. It’s boring, everyone’s over it, and everyone’s over being worried about you for the billionth time. Just…I don’t know. Feel _better_ , so that we all can.” 

The deep, guttural call of a crow echoes through the quiet between them, and Stan can feel his fingers shake as Eddie stands up, as Eddie opens his mouth to say something, the cut of regret ricocheting through his look, and maybe he does mean to say something else, but Stan wouldn’t know.

Stan runs.

&

There was this one time back in elementary school when Bowers’ gang had tried to make Stan eat a urinal cake in the boys’ locker room. It had been a particularly creative blend of Stan’s last name and the idea of the tea party set up for the Grandparent’s Day festivities at the school.

Luckily they hadn’t gotten that far, as Richie had bodily thrown all seventy pounds of himself directly into Bowers’ back, sending him head first into the porcelain urinal. It had been so quick, Stan almost hadn’t been able to process what had happened, maybe never would have if it hadn’t been for Richie’s fingers, suddenly jerking at his wrist and dragging him out of the locker rooms and down the hallway and finally into an abandoned classroom, to a safe spot beneath a stack of dusty desks. 

“It’s you and me, alright?” Richie had said as Stan had rocked back and forth. “It doesn’t matter what else happens. We’ll always be there for each other. It’ll always be you and me.”

&

The shrubbery cuts up Stan’s arms as he powers through it, the hot swell of tears building at his eyes, like the pressure Richie said he had before, and it’s all he can do not to run. Not to let his feet take him forwards in a way his heart never can. Because he knows now, knows it all. Or, at least, knows enough.

He tries to follow the sound of the birds, or, rather, to run from the sounds of the traffic, deeper into the wilder parts of the park. Safer and further away. It’s not long though before he hears his name called out, and the fluster through the bushes, and then Stan sees Richie, and his tears turn into hacking sobs, so forceful he has to crouch in the dirt to be rid of them. 

“Stan! What the hell? Is this about the note I left? We don’t have to still be fighting if you don’t want.” 

“I didn’t know why I was so mad at you,” Stan cries, the heady, heavy feeling of grief building in his chest. “But I think I do now.” 

Richie pauses, watching, and Stan knows it all, knows it clear as day. 

“You said it was always you and me,” Stan says. “But it wasn’t. _Hasn’t_ been, and then we were in the sewers, and I was all alone. You let IT get me.”

A look so pained it hurts to see crosses Richie’s face, and Stan has to look away, to stare down at Richie’s scratched up legs, and his scuffed shoes and his ugly, stained shorts, and he trembles as Richie steps closer and then back away again, and finally settles, crouching down beside him.

It takes even longer for Richie to talk, his loud, brash voice, oddly soft. 

“I heard you, you know,” Richie says. “When you were talking to Mike. When you said that we were friends because nobody else wanted to be friends with us, but that’s not true. I liked you. Even in preschool. You were weird, and you had to count things too many times, and you liked – _like_ – birds, _way_ too much for someone who is not a hundred years old, but I don’t know. Do you have to have things in common to like someone?” 

Stan frowns, breath still wet with tears, as he hooks his chin over his knees, and he shrugs. It’s enough to make Richie sigh again, to press his weight back into his hands and spread his knees, letting one knock against Stan’s. The contact, for the instant of it, is electric. 

“You didn’t like me?” 

_You don’t like me?_ That’s the real question, and it’s enough to leave Stan turning his body away. He doesn’t like Richie, that’s the thing. Richie is brash and annoying, and he messes up his hair, and he seems to like moving things, just a little, whenever Stan’s let him into his room. He never brushes his own hair, and his glasses are always smudged, and that’s not even starting on his clothes or his room, or his really, really bad jokes. 

But there’s something deeper than like, that holds Stan to Richie all the same. Something that enjoys the way Richie laughs, and is used to the smell of him, something that makes the way Richie acts seem almost acceptable to Stan’s very narrow view. Like the way he can bully Stan out of any funk, or how easily he can meet new people, and how easily he can make them love him, in spite of everything. The way he uses accents to diffuse a situation, or the fact that he seems to know, almost inherently, when Stan’s having a Bad Day with his dad or his OCD or with whatever group of bullies has decided the only Jewish kid at Derry Middle School is prime pickings for the day. The fact that he was the only Loser at Stan’s Bar Mitzvah. 

The fact that Richie would kill a clown for any one of them. 

He lets out a shaky breath, and glances back at Richie, who’s wide eyes and lightly pursed lips are twisting at the edge, holding tight, like he has any sort of answer, 

“I liked you,” Stan says after a second, and Richie seems to breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Good. Do you still like me?”

Stan sighs, but nods, and it’s enough to make Richie grin, but the twist of it doesn’t stay there for long. 

“I’m sorry I let IT get you,” he says. “I’m sorry that I’m always letting things get you. I want to promise you that I won’t let anything hurt you, but I can’t. What I can promise is that I’ll do everything I can to take care of you. That I’ll lo--,” Richie pinks, bright around the edges. “That I’ll like you. Even if you do become Freddy Krueger and haunt all our dreams, or even if you stay as lame as you are and I become really cool in highschool.” 

Stan snorts, and Richie relaxes beside him, letting Stan drop his head to his shoulder and rub his nose on the back of his hand. They’re like that for a minute, sitting in the dirt floor of the park, their sides pressed against the other, like a neat pair of Siamese Twins. 

“Hey, Stan?” 

“Yeah?” 

“This is nice and all, but you’re getting blood on my shirt.” 

Stan blushes, and Richie grins, touching Stan’s hand with his own. 

“It’s okay. It’s not the first time my shoulder’s been left _moist_ with bodily fluids.” 

Stan groans, shoving at Richie’s hyena-cackling head as he starts to stand up, wiping the blood off his face as best he can. He doesn’t feel good exactly, but there’s something warm in his belly all the same, something sweet, and good, and pure, and he might not know what it is, but he know he feels it best of all when he looks at Richie. 

“Hey, Richie,” Stan says, as Richie stands up too. 

“Yeah?”

“I’ll like you too. Even if…” Stan pauses, struggles to find the words, and finally just settles on that. “Even if.” 

Richie’s grin is blinding.

“Even if,” he agrees.


End file.
